Serbia shall live! Serbia '14 4th Invasion AAR - Central Powers conceded turn 150

[ComradeP]

Day 16. 06:00 October 22nd 1915. Mud conditions. Turn 120.



The Combined Detachment of the Beograd Detachment is having some difficulty with the Landsturm mountain units, but will hold the objective on the hill until it expires.

Palanka has to be held by the Danube I Division until turn 126 and that will be a close call too, but after a large field gun stack murdered ~450 overstacked Germans which happened to move in a three battalion stack to prepare for an assault against a Cadre battalion, the advance slowed down just enough to hold the objective.

I did lose a B quality MG unit from the Danube I Division when the stack it was in was assaulted and forced to retreat.

Field gun/MG units being likely to take most of the losses when assaulted if the infantry battalion in their stack is Disrupted is the reason why I prefer to keep support weapons behind the infantry holding frontline. That, in turn, is why most of my field gun and MG units haven't done much for most of the game due to visibility being 1. MG units in particular can disappear at staggering rates during enemy assaults.

As an aside, that's a major handicap for he Austro-Hungarian formations in 1914. The mostly D/E morale MG units are likely to Disrupt if they take opportunity fire when switching to T-mode, which means you can't move them out of the hex in most cases. All the Serbian player has to do is fire and assault and you start to lose MG units left and right.



After both sides lost several hundred men, the Negotin Detachment and German forces opposing them switched to some skirmishing. That gave the Drina I Division the time it needed to rationalize its defensive positions and allow the battalions on the other side of the Velika Morava to join the rest of the formation by crossing the bridge west of Svilajnac during the night.

In case you're wondering why I'm not screening the river: the Germans have no bridging units in this area, and ferrying units across by boats is slow and risky. They would also be Isolated.



The Combined Division and the Krajina Detachment (green) use the primary road to head west. As mentioned in the commentary for last turn, Zajechar will be held by border guard companies for the rest of the day.



Now that all three divisions in the area are more or less aligned, the evacuation of Nis can proceed. The pink units belong to Fortress Nis. The Fortress HQ has no movement points so it will be destroyed a couple of times when the Bulgarians bump into it after it is initially destroyed and reappears.